Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. "

Related Quotes:

" No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. "

Hannah Arendt

Power

Punishment

Time

" By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality. "

" The Third World is not a reality but an ideology. "

" To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious. "

Hannah Arendt

Free

" Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. "

" Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. "

" War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford. "

" The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. "

" Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. "

" It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country. "

" The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. "

" In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism. "

Hannah Arendt

Escape

Try

" The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. "

Hannah Arendt

Leader

Error

" The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. "

" Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject. "

" Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. "

" This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes. "

" Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx. "

" Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. "

" Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. "

" No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny. "

" Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up. "

" There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. "

" The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. "

" The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. "

" For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. "

" Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. "

" Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance. "

" Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses. "

" These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties. "